sherlock holmes and his creator: a case of mistaken identity

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Colby Quarterly Colby Quarterly Volume 31 Issue 3 September Article 3 September 1995 Sherlock Holmes and His Creator: A Case of Mistaken Identity Sherlock Holmes and His Creator: A Case of Mistaken Identity Harold Orel Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq Recommended Citation Recommended Citation Colby Quarterly, Volume 31, no.3, September 1995, p. 169-178 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Colby Quarterly by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Colby.

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Colby Quarterly Colby Quarterly

Volume 31 Issue 3 September Article 3

September 1995

Sherlock Holmes and His Creator: A Case of Mistaken Identity Sherlock Holmes and His Creator: A Case of Mistaken Identity

Harold Orel

Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq

Recommended Citation Recommended Citation Colby Quarterly, Volume 31, no.3, September 1995, p. 169-178

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Colby Quarterly by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Colby.

Sherlock Holmes and His Creator:A Case ofMistaken Identity

by HAROLD OREL

T HE CONTROVERSY OVER whether Sherlock Holmes is the mirror image of hiscreator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is now more than a century old. Those

interested in tracing resemblances between the GreatDetective and Conan Doylefound enough material in the biographical data available to readers of the earlyyears of this century to justify several full-length magazine articles. ConanDoyle, though increasingly irritated by pontifical statements made about hispersonal habits, felt obliged to acknowledge the persistence of the supposedresemblance in his autobiography, Memories and Adventures (1942), which heprepared toward the very end ofhis life. More than thirty years later, in 1960, hisson, Adrian, argued that Conan Doyle was indeed the original of Holmes.

It is not an easy issue to settle, though the "evidence" presented by Adrian wasintended to end all speculation on this score. Conan Doyle's generousacknowledgement of his debt to Dr. Joseph Bell of Edinburgh, whose shrewddiagnoses ofailments had deeply impressed him during his student days, and hisfull awareness of the contributions made by earlier practitioners of the detectivestory, should have nipped in the bud all theorizing about the origins of SherlockHolmes; but of course it didn't. The elevation of the sixty Holmes stories to thestatus of a "Sacred Canon" gave free rein to the Sherlockians-ChristopherMorley, Elmer Davis, Ronald Knox, and Dorothy Sayers, among many others­who maintained that, to give Conan Doyle maximum credit, he had arranged todeposit Dr. John H. Watson's reminiscences at The StrandMagazine , where theywere subsequently published one story at a time.

Tempers have flared, perhaps most notably that of Conan Doyle himself.Arthur Guiterman, a minor poet and essayist at the beginning of this century,addressed a letter in "clever doggerel" to Conan Doyle as one ofa series entitled"Letters to the Literati." (It was printed in the weekly penny paper LondonOpinion, December 14, 1912.) The poem accused Doyle ofbeing conceited andcomplacent, just like Sherlock Holmes.

Conan Doyle, as one mightexpect, took umbrage at its appearance. Guitermanwas claiming that Conan Doyle had borrowed his inspiration for Holmes fromEdgar Allan Poe's Monsieur Dupin, and that he had then spoken contemptuouslyabout Poe, disowning him as an influence.

In response, Conan Doyle wrote a doggerel poem of his own (printed inLondon Opinion, December 28, 1912). It began with the lines,

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and it ended,

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Sure, there are times when one cries with acidity,'Where are the limits of human stupidity?'

Pray master this, my esteemed commentator,That the created is not the creator.So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle,The doll and its maker are never identical.

Even so, a number of points ofcontact between Sherlock Holmes and ConanDoyle are certainly striking. Brief sketches of their respective lives will proveuseful at this point. Holmes was born in 1854 to a family of English country­squires. His grandmother was the sisterofCarle Vernet, a famous French painter.His brilliant brother, Mycroft, was seven years older than he and involved ingovernment service at the highest level; he dealt with national security problems.Praise from Victor Trevor's father-mentioned in "The Gloria Scott"-helpedto determine Sherlock Holmes's choice of career as a consulting expert incriminology. Holmes had a highly developed knowledge of chemistry; indeed,athis first meeting withDr. Watson, he described vividly his test for haemoglobin;and the canon contains several references to his test-tube experiments. He knewa great deal more than the average Englishman about the intricacies of the law.His range of interests was extraordinarily wide. In The Sign ofFour, he indulgedat a dinner party in comments on miracle plays, medieval pottery, Stradivariusviolins, the Buddhism ofCeylon, and warships of the future. He loved to travel;surely that was made evident by his journeys to Florence, Tibet, Persia,Khartoum, and France, during his years of self-imposed exile after his supposeddeath at the Reichenbach Falls, when he traveled-at least part of the time­disguised as Sigerson, a Norwegian explorer.

In all these respects he may remind some readers of Conan Doyle. Even hisdistrust of women was accompanied by an unfailingly courteous behaviortoward them, as for example Maud Bellamy ("a most remarkable woman,"Holmes said in "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane") and Irene Adler, anAmerican operatic diva retired in London ("the woman" forever in Holmes'smind, and perhaps his heart as well). Add to these aspects ofhis personality a loveof amateur sports, a love of gardens and serious music, and a hope that one daymen and women would all become "citizens of the same world-wide country"­an opinion expressed in "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor"-and the casefor a mirror image seems fairly strong.

The first thirty years of Arthur Conan Doyle's life (1859-1930) were not asclearly blessed by a benevolent fortune. At the time, as well as in the autumnyears ofhis career, it seemed rather ordinary and even dispiriting to the man whowas destined to create the most universal and enduring character of Victorianfiction. Born into an artistically talented Catholic family, he could take pride inhis grandfather, John Doyle, who emigrated from Ireland to England and secureda high reputation as a caricaturist and artist specializing in political subjectmatter, as well as in his uncles: Henry Doyle, also an artist and director of theNational Gallery, Dublin; James Doyle, a creator of colour-prints and a well-

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respected historian; and Richard Doyle, the artist who drew for Punch (indeed,he designed its cover) and a man about town who dined regularly with suchnotables as the Prince of Wales.

His father, Charles Altamont Doyle, also drew illustrations for magazines andchildren's books, while working as a clerk for the Board ofWorks in Edinburgh;he ran a genteel, ifsomewhat shabby, home. His wife, Mary Doyle, loved Frenchculture and taught her son the fine points ofheraldry-which he would put to usein his later, very popular historical romances, such as The White Company.

Conan Doyle was an athlete who played hard at various sports, includingcricket and football. (In later years he would write a novel, a play, and severalshort stories about the manly art of boxing.) His education at Hodder andStonyhurst schools in Lancashire, England, and at Feldkirch, Austria (all Jesuitestablishments), did little to confirm his Roman Catholic faith, and probably led,by labyrinthine ways, to the agnosticism he found so congenial during his yearsas a student at Edinburgh University. His home had been genteel, but it turnedincreasingly shabby as his father's fortunes deteriorated (the inevitable result ofalcoholism and mental illness).

In 1880, while still a student, Conan Doyle went to sea. He signed on as ship'ssurgeon, first aboard a Greenland whaler and then a West African freighter.Returning to England in January 1882, he became a junior partner in a newlyestablished practice at Plymouth. George Turnavine Budd, the fonner fellow­upperclassman with whom he practiced, turned out to be a hustler and a man ofdubious ethics. Conan Doyle, in disgust, moved to Southsea, near Brighton, andestablished his own office. Budd was reincarnated as Dr. Cullingworth in TheStark Munro Letters, a largely autobiographical novel that Doyle would laterpublish (1895).

Eight years of an undistinguished career-from 1882 to 189O-promisednothing but small pay and continuing obscurity in a small town. Though he triedto specialize in ophthalmology, and even moved to London to set up a practicethere, commercial success eluded him. The high points of these years includedcompletion of his dissertation on the syphilis-related condition of tabes dorsalis(July 1885); his marriage to Louisa "Touie" Hawkins; and his first (rathermodest) successes as a writer ofadventure stories, printed in All the Year Round,London Society, Chambers's Journal, Lippincott's Magazine, and Boys' OwnPaper.

But he was finding his way. The art of storytelling was deeply imbedded inhis genes. A Study in Scarlet (1887) and Sign ofthe Four (the original title ofTheSign ofFour) (1890), though not widely noticed when originally published, ledthe way to a long sequence of short stories printed in The Strand Magazine, thefortunes of which were to remain intimately tied to those of Conan Doyle for afull quarter-century. These were phenomenally successful. He decided not towait any longer for patients to show up in his consulting room. From then on heseldom looked back.

He worked as a volunteer senior civil physician in South Africa during theBoer War, helping to run a privately funded hospital near Bloemfontaine, and he

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used his medical knowledge in a large proportion ofhis stories. Holmes, after all,always respected Dr. Watson for his medical skills, and as a fellow professional.

Conan Doyle's life became increasingly crowded. He ran two unsuccessfulcampaigns as a Liberal Unionist for a seat in the House of Commons. Thenfollowed the death from consumption of "Touie" in 1906; his marriage to JeanLeckie in 1907; his military history ofthe Great War; his lecture tours in Canada,the United States, and several other countries; and his impassioned defence ofspiritualism, about which he wrote and lectured from 1918 on.

Conan Doyle will not be remembered for his historical romances as often asfor his Sherlock Holmes stories, though the former were hugely successful at theturn of the century. Vox populi has spoken unequivocally on this matter.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Conan Doyle fancied himself, on occasion, tobe a better sleuth than the detectives of Scotland Yard and the men who servedin various local constabularies. His most notable success came in 1906, when hebegan an investigation of a series of livestock mutilations in Staffordshire. Forthese crimes George Edalji, a young former solicitor ofIndian descent, had beensentenced to seven years imprisonment. Doyle proved that Edalji, who sufferedfrom uncorrectable astigmatic myopia, could not possibly have wanderedaround a field in the middle of the night and a severe rainstorm, evading policepatrols, in order to slash a pony. Edalji, Conan Doyle demonstrated, had been avictim of biased testimony and racial hatred. He went further and identified theman who lived in the area and was almost certainly the real criminal. The HomeOffice finally granted Edalji a pardon; he was readmitted to legal practice, andthe fallout from his case included the establishment of an English court ofcriminal appeal (1907).

Other cases intrigued Conan Doyle, and to these he contributed time, energy,his writing talent, and considerable sums of money: that of Adolph Beck,accused of swindling women and convicted on the basis of faulty identificationsand the testimony ofsupposed handwriting experts; that ofOscar Slater, who wasaccused ofhaving murdered a wealthy elderly lady ofeighty-three (Doyle foughtthis case for sixteen years and was largely responsible for Slater's release in1927); and that of the gentleman who, together with some forty pounds that hehad withdrawn from the bank, disappeared from a London hotel room (theprocess of reasoning whereby Doyle identified what had happened to him isamusingly recounted in Memories and Adventures).

Conan Doyle once tried his hand at solving the murders committed by Jackthe Ripper. In an interview that he gave a reporter for the Cincinnati CommercialGazette, published on June 10, 1894, he told of going to the Scotland YardMuseum to look at a letterwritten by someone who claimed to be Jack the Ripper.(Many experts believe to this day that the letter was authentic.) Conan Doyle,noting that the language of the letter contained several American expressions,and that the handwriting was "round, easy, clerky," and that the paper stock wasbetter than average, imagined what Sherlock Holmes might have suggested as aplan to the police. Holmes would have reproduced the letters in facsimile; on

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each plate he would have appended a note, indicating "the peculiarities of thehandwriting." Then the facsimiles would be published in the leading newspapersof Great Britain and America, and in connection with them a reward would beoffered "to anyone who could show a letter or any specimen of the samehandwriting. Such a course would have enlisted millions ofpeople as detectivesin the case."

But, unfortunately, the police did not act on Holmes's plan as outlined byConan Doyle. Even though this suggested way to proceed might have produceda useful result, it was never followed, and the case of Jack the Ripper-forvarious reasons-was never solved to everyone's satisfaction.

The differences between Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle areequally striking and should be reviewed as well.

In "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor" Sherlock Holmes said that he readnothing but the criminal news and the agony column. "The latter," he added, "isalways instructive." That statement is all the more remarkable because ofHolmes's knowledge of the daily press. In one story he identified the Londonnewspapers which would print a personal advertisement: the Globe, Star, PallMall, St. James's, Evening News Standard, and Echo.

But Conan Doyle read more than newspapers and took an avid interest incountless issues that would scarcely have interested Holmes. This should beremembered despite the bold assertion ofLady Conan Doyle in her essay writtenfor Pearson's Magazine (December 1934), entitled "Conan Doyle was SherlockHolmes." Her husband, she wrote, "had the Sherlock Holmes brain," and"sometimes he privately solved mysteries that had nonplussed the police." Thus,she agreed with her son Adrian. But she did not deal effectively with the counter­argument that, despite the fact that many people in different lines of work have"remarkable powers ofdeduction and inference," they do notdeserve to be calledSherlock Holmeses.

More to the point, one relevant subject warrants more investigation than it hasreceived: Conan Doyle's sense ofwhat constituted fair play-in other words, hissense of justice.

Holmes had a special concept of what needed to be done to bring to accountsomeone who had transgressed the law. One story tells us that he watched frombehind a curtain as a woman whose life had been ruined fired "barrel after barrel"into the body ofher betrayer, "the king ofall the blackmailers," Charles AugustusMilverton. Holmes did nothing to prevent her from grinding her heel intoMilverton's upturned face or from escaping into "the night air." Even moreremarkable, he refused to help Inspector Lestrade: "The fact is," he told hisvisitor from Scotland Yard, "that I knew this fellow Milverton, that I consideredhim one of the most dangerous men in London, and that I think there are certaincrimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justifyprivate vengeance. No, it's no use arguing. I have made up my mind. Mysympathies are with the criminals rather than with the victim, and I will nothandle this case."

"The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" is only one of five cases in

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which Holmes allowed the killer to escape: "The Adventure of the AbbeyGrange," "The Boscombe Valley Mystery," "The Adventure of the Devil'sFoot," and "The Adventure ofthe Veiled Lodger." Holmes, unlike Conan Doyle,decided in his own mind whether or not the murderer had ethical justification forwhat he had done. Though he did not impede an official investigation, he morethan once decided not to make known to the police the identity ofthe person theywere seeking. Indeed, such decisions are recorded in a surprising number ofstories scattered throughout the canon. Orlando Park, in his valuable referencework, Sherlock Holmes, Esq., and John H. Watson, M.D. : An Encyclopaedia ofTheir Affairs (Evansville, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1962), notesthat Holmes's attitude is found "often enough in these sixty cases to suggest thatit was basic. The reader must read such cases and form an independent opinionas to the correctness of Holmes's attitude" (p. 78).

And there are other special moments in the canon. In "The Blue Carbuncle,"a story that took place during the Christmas season, Holmes announced that hewas not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies. "I suppose that I amcommuting a felony," he mused for Watson's benefit (he had just allowed thecriminal Ryder to escape); "but it is just possible that I am saving a soul. Thisfellow will not go wrong again; he is too terribly frightened. Send him tojail now,and you make him a jail-bird for life. Besides, it is the season of forgiveness.Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and itssolution is its own reward."

In "The Abbey Grange," Holmes told Watson that "once or twice" in hiscareer he had felt that he had done more real harm by his discovery ofthe criminalthan ever he had done by his crime. "I have learned caution now," he added, "andI had rather play tricks with the law of England than with my own conscience."This is the story, by the way, in which Holmes told Captain Crocker, a confessedmurderer ofa wife beater, that he acquitted the Captain ofhis crime, and that "Solong as the law does not find some other victim, you are safe from me." He urgedCaptain Crocker to "disappear in the next twenty-four hours."

The number of stories in which the issues are arnbiguously presented issurprisingly large. A Study in Scarlet, "The Devil's Foot," and "The CrookedMan" are only three of the stories in question. It is not easy to predict, on a firstreading of several such cases, how Holmes will judge the issue and whether aprivate individual's mercy will interfere with the strict judgments of the law.

"What is the meaning of it, Watson?" Holmes asks (at the conclusion of "TheCardboard Box"). "What object is served by this circle of misery and violenceand fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, whichis unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem towhich human reason is as far from an answer as ever."

Holmes feared the east wind that was coming, "such a wind as never blew onEngland yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many ofus may witherbefore its blast." So he thought in "His Last Bow." He seemed to recognizeincreasingly often, as the years wore on, the impossibility ofsettling all problemsby use of reason.

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Compare that growing grimness, the gathering in of shadows, these inhibi­tions affecting Holmes's willingness to act even as he acknowledged that not allhis options were clear-achange that we may associate with the aging process­to the indomitable spirit of Conan Doyle, the author behind the stories. Even inhis fiercest polemics against those who refused to recognize the value of theSpiritualist movement, Conan Doyle never thought that the east wind of achanging age could frost his determination to speak the truth as he saw it and todefend the right.

In some ways he gave freer scope to his imagination than Holmes did; heincreasingly often thought of Holmes as "merely a mechanical creature, not aman of flesh and blood,-and easy to create because he was soulless." (This isnot a reference to Holmes's ignorance of astronomy, the theories of Copernicusand the composition of the solar system, or of literature, philosophy, andpolitics-a list of intellectual limits as recorded by Watson in the second chapterof A Study in Scarlet. As the canon grew, Holmes's knowledge of the sciencesand the arts correspondingly improved. Holmes was not everas two-dimensionalas Conan Doyle pretended.)

Nevertheless, there is something freer and larger about Conan Doyle'ssympathies with the oppressed, the unjustly persecuted, the underprivileged,than we can claim for Holmes's character.

This is not the same as making a case for viewing Conan Doyle as a real-lifeincarnation of Kipling's Kim, a friend of all the world. There were moments inhis life when even his friends were startled by an Old Testament ferocity in whathe said or did. Desmond Hawkins, a distinguished literary critic who hasspecialized in this period ofEnglish history, once wrote that DoyIe was not a manhe could warm to. "There seems to be a repressed violence in him that he managesto control with an effort that might fail at any moment. In that particular breedof Englishman there is a hint of the vigilante when self-righteousness isfrustrated."

Many readers familiar with Conan Doyle's life may recall how surprised theywere at a statement made by Conan Doyle during his visit to Sing Sing atOssining in New York State, and after he had sat in the electric chair to see howit felt. (He wanted to imagine the current crashing through his body.) He wasastonishingly grim about what needed to be done to punish those who in time ofwar fought unfairly and were responsible for the deaths of women and children.In 1901, citing as his precedent the fact that the Germans during the Franco­Prussian War had continually carried French hostages in the trains, he recom­mended putting a truck full of"Boer irreconcilables" behind every engine whichpassed through a dangerous part of South Africa. The first duty, Conan Doyleargued, was to English soldiers. The Boer attacks on railway trains had killednoncombatants indiscriminately, and these were outrages that invited-nay,demanded-reprisals.

His anger at the Germans during the Great War may be traced in Letters to thePress, edited by John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green. He had aclear notion of what the rules of war were. When the German Navy laid mines

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in open waters and caused the death of neutrals, this was "murder." It wasimmoral to bombard unfortified towns by sea or by air. The Germans treatedprisoners with shocking disregard for what was right, for what was necessary ina world that respected civilized values. Zeppelin raids on helpless civiliansenraged him. He urged retaliatory raids upon German towns, and he did notflinch at the thought that Gennan civilians might be killed. "The Hun is onlyformidable when he thinks that he can be frightful with impunity," he told hiscountrymen. '''Blood and Iron' is his doctrine so long as it is his iron and someone else's blood."

He hated lukewarm feelings, at least so far as the Germans were concerned.Hatred-a righteous wrath-was the means whereby the English could attain aninvincible (and, from his point ofview, a necessary) resolve. "When Miss Cavellwas shot," he wrote in 1918, "we should at once have shot our three leadingprisoners. When Captain Fryatt was murdered we should have executed twosubmarine captains. These are the arguments which the German mentality canunderstand.... We have law and justice on our side. If they attempt a reprisal,then our own counter-reprisals must be sharp, stern, and relentless. If we are tohave war to the knife, then let it at least be equal for both parties."

Thatwas written in wartime, during a period ofemotional excess. When peaceprevailed in the land, did Conan Doyle speak as stridently about the issues he wasinterested in? The answer is Yes.

His hatred of Establishment influence used to create injustices in court, hiscontempt for lawyers who behaved abominably while covering up legal scandalsand for the inexcusable behavior of police officials who assisted them in doingso, were not limited to the cases of George Edalji and Oscar Slater.

Some court sentences struck him as entirely inappropriate, such as the threemonths judgment against an American lady who had stolen some small articlesof silver from a hotel room. "It is to a consulting-room, and not a cell, that sheshould be sent," he argued. He stood up for women workers in a Brighton hotelwhose pay was being reduced. As he told the voters in 1900, he felt pledged tooppose all narrow or reactionary legislation. Indeed, his concerns ranged fromthe relatively minor-as when he denounced the officials who set speed traps inthe Guildford district during the summer to catch motorists, or the Sunday lawswhich prevented rifle shooting while allowing cycling, motoring, and boating aslegitimate activities on the Sabbath-to more important issues. The latterincluded the stupidity ofthe Lord Chamberlain in his capacity as censor ofplays;the unforgivable intolerance of the divorce laws (which Conan Doyle thoughtwere based largely upon theological considerations); the color prejudices whichprevented full Empire representation at the Olympic Games; the outrageousmurdering of wild birds for their skins and plumes (he was a prime mover in theImportation ofPlumage Prohibition Bill of 1914); wartime profiteering; and therelease (for whatever reason) of criminals who had been convicted three or fourtimes of a penal offence.

"We segregate our lunatics and we segregate our infectious cases," he wroteThe Times in 1929, "and the hardened criminal is a mixture of both. He is a man

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with a dangerous idee fixe, and he is a man who is likely to infect others byexerting his influence upon those who are younger or weaker than himself. Theworld has no use for him. He is the enemy ofsociety. It is folly, therefore, to givehim successive sentences, which mean intervals when we have to pay the penaltyfor our own weak and illogical leniency. The true method of guarding ourselvesis to eliminate him altogether. From the time that his true character is establishedthe prison doors should never open again."

Even those who agree with the sentiment will concede its harshness of tone.But ifConan Doyle is occasionally described as one of the few Great Victorianswho speak directly to our own age, it is because he had an uncanny knack forinteresting himself in issues that remain timely.

Some of Conan Doyle's positions are certainly cranky, such as in 1926-theyear of the General Strike in England, the year of widespread unrest among adisillusioned populace-his denunciation of the habit vacationers had devel­oped ofgoing to the Riviera for hotel accommodations rather than to the southerncoast of England. He proposed a heavy poll tax to penalize those who mademoney in England and preferred to spend it abroad. He believed that only goodreasons ofhealth or ofbusiness could excuse their absence from England. He wasin favor of blacklisting tax evaders in the Channel Islands and other placesabroad; if they remained recalcitrant, he went on, they should be deprived of allrights of citizenship. "The times are serious," he declared, "and drastic methodsare needed." In brief, he believed that he was delivering a just verdict on thosewho merited punishment for shirking their duties to home and country, and hedid not flinch from the charge that he might be more extreme than circumstanceswarranted. At such moments he reminds us of Sir Nigel Loring in The WhiteCompany, who preferred to return two blows for every one that he received, andthe other great historical figures of that romance: John Chandros, Pedro ofCastile, the Black Prince and his father, the noble Edward III, and the semi­mythical Bertrand du Guesclin, warriors all, men determined not to be defeatedin the continuing battles of life.

What, then, did Conan Doyle's sense of justice amount to? He demanded afair hearing for all sides ofa question. (When he wrote The War in South Africa:Its Cause and Conduct, he was incensed that the foreign press had presented onlyone side of the issue; he wanted to explain the British view.) He urged that tariffproposals, and other Government bills, should be judged "in a judicial andimpartial spirit," because such judgments would perform "an important nationalservice." He urged greater equity in taxes, pointing to the disparity between whatthe poor paid for their necessities and what the rich did not have to pay for theimport of diamonds, motor cars, velvets, and silks. He wanted reforms in thesystem of income-tax assessment, and elimination of the assessor's right toimpose "peculiarly outrageous" judgments on helpless citizens. His was one ofthe angriest voices raised against the villainous behavior of the representativesof King Leopold of Belgium in central Africa, behavior that remains appallingand unforgivable to this day. In similar fashion he condemned Portugal, in 1910,for its barbarous treatment ofprisoners: "We have before us," he wrote, "cruelty,

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injustice, want of chivalry, everything which is alien to the real Portuguesenature.... "

Unlike Sherlock Holmes, who had little or no interest in opinions and leadingarticles, Conan Doyle was a man who held strong opinions and wanted a free playof opinions in an open forum; and he was capable of changing his mind, too, aswhen he became a convert, in 1911, to the cause of Home Rule for Ireland. Hedid not want to be ignored, or his proposals for remedying social wrongs andinjustice to be taken lightly. He was, taken all in all, a courageous warrior enlistedin one cause after another. He was on the right side most ofthe time-the morallyright side, the ethically right side. He deserves to be remembered in our age forboth the passion of his convictions and the eloquence with which he expressedhis views.

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